Popcorn & Candy: Rememberances of Fascism Past
DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Federico Fellini's last real masterpiece was also his most deeply personal, and in some ways most deeply conflicted film. There is a sweet nostalgia in the memories of his youth, presented here in this year-in-the-life portrait of a seaside Italian town much like Rimini, where the director grew up. But that upbringing was also in 1930s Italy, when Mussolini's fascism not only held the country in its grip, but also enjoyed the wildly popular support of the people. As light-hearted and hilarious as much of Amarcord is, the undercurrent of the complicity of these simple people in such dark deeds is never far from the surface. While it's easy to write off the more puerile aspects of the film to the fact that its point of view is that of Fellini as a teenage boy, all the fart jokes, leering at big-bottomed peasant-women, and comically stereotyped school authority figures are sharp criticisms of what the director saw as a perpetual state of moral adolescence that allowed Mussolini to prosper.
Fellini isn't so interested in plot as he is in portraiture here, using episodes in a varying cast of characters from the town, in both reality and fantasy, to present a fantastically nuanced picture of a particular place and time. Woven throughout is the involvement and coming of age of Titta, the stand-in for the younger Fellini. Amarcord contains so many little stories and anecdotes and dreams that it can become overwhelming at times; luckily, the film is gorgeous enough that you can just switch off and enjoy the sights for a few minutes until you catch your breath. Many of the images here are some of the most unforgettable in all of film: the "puffballs" of spring floating over Titta as he stands out on a lonely quay; the villagers sitting out on the Adriatic in the dead of night on rowboats waiting for the passage of a great ocean liner; and most achingly beautiful of all, a peacock lighting on a fountain and spreading its tailfeathers in the midst of a heavy snow. An opportunity to see this on a big screen is not to be missed.
View the trailer.
A brand new 35mm print opens tomorrow at E Street for one week only.
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Crips and Bloods: Made in America
Stacy Peralta is no stranger to documentaries about youth-centric subcultures. But the board-riding subjects of his previous docs, the excellent Dogtown and Z-Boys and Riding Giants, seem fairly innocuous in comparison to his latest, which examines Los Angeles's two most infamous gangs. But what typified Peralta's skateboarding and surfing movies is his meticulous research into the genesis of these cultures. Not just a surface look at how they operate and what they're about, but a finely tuned investigation of why they came into being. It's this sensibility that he brings to the far more serious subject of how these gangs arose and came to be in such a bloody rivalry, as he tries to make some sense out of years of senseless violence.
View the trailer.
At the AFI on Sunday at 1 p.m. and Monday at 8:45 p.m.
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DC Environmental Film Festival (continued)
We talked last week about the opening of the D.C. Environmental Film Festival. It's now in full swing, and has plenty to offer in the coming week. The AFI is putting their Paul Newman retrospective on temporary hold for the next few days to host the festival's Herzog collection, which will show 11 films by the director — narrative, documentary, and short — between Friday and Wednesday. Other highlights include a five-hour series of ocean films on Saturday at the Natural History Museum, including the world premiere of A Sea Change (pictured), a documentary about the threats presented by ocean acidification, and featuring a Q&A with director Barbara Ettinger after the screening. And at the Phillips collection on Saturday, the gallery ties together its month-long Italian film series with the Environmental Film Festival with two films, Cows are Nice and Mr. Bené Goes to Italy, that examine the impact of the food industry on agriculture and farming communities.
The DCEFF started earlier this week and goes through March 22 and dozens of venues around town. See the schedule for details.
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Robert Blecker is a death penalty advocate. Actually, that's a bit of an understatement. He's a death penalty enthusiast. Notions of justice are secondary to Blecker, who's really out for retribution, and is unapologetic about his crusade. Which makes it all the more remarkable that he strikes up an uncomfortable, sometimes adversarial friendship with Daryl Holton, a death row inmate on the fast-track to execution after the killing of his four children, a crime for which Holton turned himself in and for which freely admits he deserves to die. Holton is the titular "me" of course, and he and Blecker spend a lot of time talking about crime and punishment and developing a relationship that challenges Blecker's viewpoints in real and complex ways. Where he ends up is immaterial; a character study of a person on either extreme side of any contentious issue playing out an internal debate has the potential to be riveting cinema on its own.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street.
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E Street has reintroduced its midnight movie series, and frankly, we're underwhelmed at the programming, which is why we haven't mentioned it previously. Fight Club and Ghostbusters might be great movies, but they're not midnight movie material. And half of the titles between now and the end of April are Star Trek movies? Who's idea was that? Where's the kitsch? Where's the cult? Midnight movies are for gratuitous low budget blood, sex, and violence, and E Street's programmers are savvy enough film fans to know that, so I say shame on them for taking the safe route. That said, they do have one legitimate midnight movie classic on the schedule, and while I think Rocky Horror is more than a little played out at this point, I know there are plenty of people who still love to don their finest fishnets, garters, and leather bustiers for an evening of time warping.
View the trailer.
E Street is your place Friday and Saturday at midnight, as well as next month on April 10 and 11.
Of course, the one organization in town that does program films that perfectly fit the midnight movie mold does all their screenings on Tuesdays at 8 p.m. That would be Washington Psychotronic Film Society, and as we mentioned earlier this week, they're celebrating their return on Tuesday at their new venue, The Warehouse, with a screening of the 1977 spoof film American Raspberries.